Standards response

As she starts to sort out the regulation of social workers in the wake of the Baby P tragedy, David Brindle finds Rosie Varley, chair of the General Social Care Council determined to remould the profession's image and culture

Rosie Varley took over as chair of the body that registers and regulates social workers in November. Within a fortnight, the Baby P trial had ended and the profession was engulfed by controversy over the failure of services to prevent the toddler's death. Neither Varley nor her fellow leaders of the General Social Care Council (GSCC) were well prepared for the tumult as, it now emerges, they had not been notified of the case.

"We didn't know about Baby P's death until news of the trial broke," says Varley, in a startling admission that not only reflects badly on Haringey, the north London council at the centre of the scandal, but also questions how far the Department for Children, Schools and Families was on top of the issue. The death of Baby P occurred in August 2007, more than a year before the trial began. By then, the General Medical Council, the GSCC's equivalent for doctors, which had been notified by the NHS trust involved in the case, had already acted against a paediatrician.

Even when the GSCC was able to get into gear to consider the performances of social workers in the case, it encountered obstacles. "We had, in the early days, enormous difficulty in getting Haringey to share information," says Varley, adding that the council was now co-operating well. "The impression I get is that there is not the culture out there, among social care employers, that when they have concerns about social workers they think, 'GSCC.'

"Employers need to recognise their responsibilities in terms of supporting, supervising, mentoring and developing their employees, but also their responsibilities for alerting us when they think they have an employee who is falling short of the standards that the public rightly expects." The same applies to agencies such as Ofsted, the inspectorate for children's services, she says. "I am told, for instance, that we have never had a reference from Ofsted. We discussed this [at the GSCC], and some of our council members felt that it was something around the culture of local authorities. More than half of them have never referred a teacher to the General Teaching Council on grounds of competence."

This is something that Varley intends to change. And it would be rash to doubt that she will. For this is a determined woman who, while new to the social care sector, has a track record of sorting out thorny issues in healthcare and has developed clear ideas about the leading role the GSCC could play in rehabilitating the image of social work in the aftermath of the Baby P affair.

Improving access

"The theme that has run through all my professional work has been a commitment to raising standards in the services that are provided to vulnerable people, and particularly to improving access to those services and promoting informed choice," she says. "What I have learned over the last 10 years has been the power of regulation in doing that. It would be my observation, moving into social care, that regulation of social care is new and has made a good start, but that as it matures it needs to raise its profile."

The GSCC started to register social workers in 2003, after the government agreed to the idea of regulation, and has since extended its remit to social work degree students. By last April, almost 800 people had been refused registration on grounds of suitability and 23 had been barred from practice. Ministers are committed to extending regulation further to all residential and homecare workers in the broader social care sector, but the form this might take is under review.

Varley, a health economist by background, is no stranger to regulation: she was for nine years chair of the General Optical Council, of which she remains a lay member, and she was acting chair of the Council for Regulatory Healthcare Excellence last year when it had to intervene to sort out crippling governance and performance difficulties at the Nursing and Midwifery Council.

As chair of the Public Guardian Board, she has been overseeing the shaky start of the Office of the Public Guardian, set up in 2007 to support decision-making by people covered by the Mental Capacity Act. So she is no stranger, either, to problem solving.

One of social work's problems, she thinks, is practitioners' inadequate preparation for the challenges they face. "I was astonished," she says, "when I came into the sector to find that a new graduate is immediately a qualified social worker and can work unsupervised. If you compare that with other professions - medicine or dentistry, optometry, pharmacy, or teaching - they have a period of one or two years during which you go out on placement and acquire, under supervision, the general practical ability and experience that will enable you to practise successfully. My own view is that it is essential, in the public interest and also in the interests of social work professionals themselves, that there should be a period between graduation and independent, unsupervised practice."

She believes that post-qualification training needs to be both strengthened and made a requirement, certainly for specialist social workers seeking re-registration. "If either a doctor or nurse were going to specialise in work with children, for example, they would need to undergo accredited specialist training, and they would have a mark on the register saying they had such training," she says. "They would need to satisfy very clearly set-down education requirements. I think it's important for it to be linked to registration."

Fall in applications

These points are made, somewhat more obliquely, in the GSCC's annual report on social work education, published today. In 2007-08, it says, there was a slight fall in the numbers of students enrolling on social work degree courses. The proportion of men enrolling has dropped to just 13%. Both of these trends will be of concern in the wake of the Baby P affair and will be studied closely by the social work taskforce, set up by children's secretary Ed Balls in response to the tragedy.

The conclusions of that taskforce will complement those of the review of registration options for the wider social care workforce and, also, the outcome of a review under way into the respective roles of the GSCC and two other social care quangos - Skills for Care, which oversees training and workforce development for the sector, and the Social Care Institute for Excellence, which has the task of spreading good practice. They may not all survive.

"I would be very keen to see the GSCC coming out of this review with an acknowledged role in education, in standards, in conduct," says Varley. "Only as a last resort should we be exercising our influence through discipline."